When I started at Playdom at the beginning of this year, I immediately found myself in small team set out to work on a new Tiki-branded island management game called Tiki Resort.

The whole project seemed to be more of a long-shot experiment than anything else: is it viable for a very small team to sort of go back to the roots, do away with a number of established conventions and approaches of game development in favor of being extremely agile, responsive to fast-moving trends, and able to prototype and deliver fully functional features literally on a daily basis? I think the answer turned out to be a definite “yes”.

Even though we had some existing framework to start with, I’m still really proud of the fact that we made the first working iteration of the game in only about 4 weeks(!). After the initial launch we aggressively pushed numerous improvements, features and content-updates to evolve the game to its current state. Right now – less than 3 months after the very first keystrokes – Tiki Resort already has more than 700.000 daily active users and roughly 3.1 million monthly active users on Facebook, a vibrant player community, and a bunch of exciting additional features still in development.

This experience only reaffirmed my (already pretty firm) belief in the “human factor” as the principal basis of every creative endeavor: I’m certain this sort of output and productivity would not have been possible without the unique philosophy and management style, nor without the outstanding chemistry and camaraderie that developed within the team.